Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (57 page)

NOTE:

Sir,

Dr. Stewart was contacted as you suggested, and after seeing Haughtree he gave his expert opinion that the man was madder than his brother had ever been. He also pointed out the possibility that the disease of Julian Haughtree’s eyes had started soon after his partial mental recovery—probably brought on by constantly wearing dark
spectacles. After Dr. Stewart left the police ward, Haughtree became very indignant and wrote the above statement.

Davies, our specialist, examined the body in the cellar himself and is convinced that the younger brother must, indeed, have been suffering from a particularly horrible and unknown ocular disease.

It is appreciated that there are one or two remarkable coincidences in the wild fancies of both brothers in relation to certain recent factual events—but these are, surely, only coincidences. One such event is the rise of the volcanic island of Surtsey. Haughtree must somehow have heard of Surtsey after being taken under observation. He asked to be allowed to read the following newspaper account, afterwards yelling very loudly and repeatedly: “By God! They’ve named it after the wrong mythos!” Thereafter he was put into a straitjacket of the arm-restricting type:

Still in the “jacket,” Haughtree finally calmed himself and begged that further interesting items in the paper be read to him. Dr. Davies did the reading, and when he reached the following report Haughtree grew very excited:

At the end of the reading Haughtree said: “Julian said they wouldn’t take him alive.” Then, still encased in the jacket, he somehow got off the bed and flung himself through the third-story window of his room in the police ward. His rush at the window was of such tremendous ferocity and strength that he took the bars and frame with him. It all happened so quickly there was nothing anyone could do to stop him.

Submitted as an appendix to my original report.
Sgt. J. T. Muir
Glasgow City Police

23 November 1963.

S
am Strutt licked his fingers and wiped them on his handkerchief; his fingertips were grey with snow from the pole on the bus platform. Then he coaxed his book out of the polythene bag on the seat beside him, withdrew the bus-ticket from between the pages, held it against the cover to protect the latter from his fingers, and began to read. As often happened the conductor assumed that the ticket authorized Strutt’s present journey; Strutt did not enlighten him. Outside, the snow whirled down the side streets and slipped beneath the wheels of cautious cars.

The slush splashed into his boots as he stepped down outside Brichester Central and, snuggling the bag beneath his coat for extra safety, pushed his way toward the bookstall, treading on the settling snowflakes. The glass panels of the stall were not quite closed; snow had filtered through and dulled the glossy paperbacks. “Look at that!” Strutt complained to a young man who stood next to him and anxiously surveyed the crowd, drawing his neck down inside his collar like a tortoise. “Isn’t that disgusting? These people just don’t care!” The young man, still searching the wet faces, agreed abstractedly. Strutt strode to the other counter of the stall, where the assistant was handing out newspapers. “I say!” called Strutt. The assistant, sorting change for a customer, gestured him to wait. Over the paperbacks, through the steaming glass, Strutt watched the young man rush forward and embrace a girl, then gently dry her face with a
handkerchief. Strutt glanced at the newspaper held by the man awaiting change.
BRUTAL MURDER IN RUINED CHURCH
, he read; the previous night a body had been found inside the roofless walls of a church in Lower Brichester, when the snow had been cleared from this marble image, frightful mutilations had been revealed covering the corpse, oval mutilations which resembled— The man took the paper and his change away into the station. The assistant turned to Strutt with a smile: “Sorry to keep you waiting.” “Yes,” said Strutt. “Do you realize those books are getting snowed on? People may want to buy them, you know.” “Do
you
?” the assistant replied. Strutt tightened his lips and turned back into the snow-filled gusts. Behind him he heard the ring of glass pane meeting pane.

GOOD BOOKS ON THE HIGHWAY
provided shelter; he closed out the lashing sleet and stood taking stock. On the shelves the current titles showed their faces while the others turned their backs. Girls were giggling over comic Christmas cards; an unshaven man was swept in on a flake-edged blast and halted, staring around uneasily. Strutt clucked his tongue; tramps shouldn’t be allowed in bookshops to soil the books. Glancing sideways to observe whether the man would bend back the covers or break the spines, Strutt moved among the shelves, but could not find what he sought. Chatting with the cashier, however, was an assistant who had praised
Last Exit to Brooklyn
to him when he had bought it last week, and had listened patiently to a list of Strutt’s recent reading, though he had not seemed to recognize the titles. Strutt approached him and enquired: “Hello—any more exciting books this week?”

The man faced him, puzzled. “Any more—?”

“You know, books like this?” Strutt held up his polythene bag to show the grey Ultimate Press cover of
The Caning-Master
by Hector Q.

“Ah, no. I don’t think we have.” He tapped his lip. “Except—Jean Genet?”

“Who? Oh, you mean
Jennet
. No, thanks, he’s dull as ditchwater.”

“Well, I’m sorry, sir, I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

“Oh.” Strutt felt rebuffed. The man seemed not to recognize him, or perhaps he was pretending. Strutt had met his kind before and had them mutely patronize his reading. He scanned the shelves again, but no cover caught his eye. At the door he furtively unbuttoned his shirt to protect his book still further, and a hand fell on his arm. Lined with grime, the hand slid down to his and touched his bag. Strutt shook it off angrily and confronted the tramp.

“Wait a minute!” the man hissed. “Are you after more books like that? I know where we can get some.”

This approach offended Strutt’s self-righteous sense of reading
books which had no right to be suppressed. He snatched the bag out of the fingers closing on it. “So you like them too, do you?”

“Oh, yes, I’ve got lots.”

Strutt sprang his trap. “Such as?”

“Oh,
Adam and Evan, Take Me How You Like
, all the Harrison adventures, you know, there’s lots.”

Strutt grudgingly admitted that the man’s offer seemed genuine. The assistant at the cash-desk was eyeing them; Strutt stared back. “All right,” he said. “Where’s this place you’re talking about?”

The other took his arm and pulled him eagerly into the slanting snow. Clutching shut their collars, pedestrians were slipping between the cars as they waited for a skidded bus ahead to be removed; flakes were crushed into the corners of the windscreens by the wipers. The man dragged Strutt amid the horns which brayed and honked, then between two store windows from which girls watched smugly as they dressed headless figures, and down an alley. Strutt recognized the area as one which he vainly combed for back-street bookshops; disappointing alcoves of men’s magazines, occasional hot pungent breaths from kitchens, cars fitted with caps of snow, loud pubs warm against the weather. Strutt’s guide dodged into the doorway of a public bar to shake his coat; the white glaze cracked and fell from him. Strutt joined the man and adjusted the book in its bag, snuggled beneath his shirt. He stamped the crust loose from his boots, stopping when the other followed suit; he did not wish to be connected with the man even by such a trivial action. He looked with distaste at his companion, at his swollen nose through which he was now snorting back snot, at the stubble shifting on the cheeks as they inflated and the man blew on his trembling hands. Strutt had a horror of touching anyone who was not fastidious. Beyond the doorway flakes were already obscuring their footprints, and the man said: “I get terrible thirsty walking fast like this.”

“So that’s the game, is it?” But the bookshop lay ahead. Strutt led the way into the bar and bought two pints from a colossal barmaid, her bosom bristling with ruffles, who billowed back and forth with glasses and worked the pumps with gusto. Old men sucked at pipes in vague alcoves, a radio blared marches, men clutching tankards aimed with jovial inaccuracy at dart-board or spittoon. Strutt flapped his overcoat and hung it next to him; the other retained his and stared into his beer. Determined not to talk, Strutt surveyed the murky mirrors which reflected gesticulating parties around littered tables not directly visible. But he was gradually surprised by the taciturnity of his table-mate; surely these people (he thought) were remarkably loquacious, in fact virtually impossible to silence? This was intolerable; sitting idly
in an airless back-street bar when he could be on the move or reading—something must be done. He gulped down his beer and thumped the glass upon its mat. The other started. Then, visibly abashed, he began to sip, seeming oddly nervous. At last it was obvious that he was dawdling over the froth, and he set down his glass and stared at it. “It looks as if it’s time to go,” said Strutt.

The man looked up; fear widened his eyes. “Christ, I’m wet,” he muttered. “I’ll take you again when the snow goes off.”

“That’s the game, is it?” Strutt shouted. In the mirrors, eyes sought him. “You don’t get that drink out of me for nothing! I haven’t come this far—!”

The man swung round and back, trapped. “All right, all right, only maybe I won’t find it in this weather.”

Strutt found this remark too inane to comment. He rose, and buttoning his coat strode into the arcs of snow, glaring behind to ensure he was followed.

The last few shop-fronts, behind them pyramids of tins marked with misspelt placards, were cast out by lines of furtively curtained windows set in unrelieved vistas of red brick; behind the panes Christmas decorations hung like wreaths. Across the road, framed in a bedroom window, a middle-aged woman drew the curtains and hid the teenage boy at her shoulder. “Hel-
lo
, there they go,” Strutt did not say; he felt he could control the figure ahead without speaking to him, and indeed had no desire to speak to the man as he halted trembling, no doubt from the cold, and hurried onward as Strutt, an inch taller than his five and a half feet and better built, loomed behind him. For an instant, as a body of snow drove toward him down the street, flakes over-exposing the landscape and cutting his cheeks like transitory razors of ice, Strutt yearned to speak, to tell of nights when he lay awake in his room, hearing the landlady’s daughter being beaten by her father in the attic bedroom above, straining to catch muffled sounds through the creak of bedsprings, perhaps from the couple below. But the moment passed, swept away by the snow; the end of the street had opened, split by a traffic-island into two roads thickly draped with snow, one curling away to hide between the houses, the other short, attached to a roundabout. Now Strutt knew where he was. From a bus earlier in the week he had noticed the
KEEP LEFT
sign lying helpless on its back on the traffic-island, its face kicked in.